On the Computation of Robust Examination Timetables: Methods and Experimental Results

Bassimir B, Wanka R (2024)


Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Journal article, Original article

Publication year: 2024

Journal

Abstract

With ever rising student numbers and an increasing shift towards more interdisciplinary study programs the requirements for finding schedules for courses and exams become ever more complex. In real world scenarios the models used in calculating solutions to the course and the examination timetabling problem are often required to be provided to the students at the time of registrations. In course timetabling this lead to the field of curriculum based course timetabling (CB-CTTP) where timetables are calculated based on the structure of the study programs. For the examination timetabling problem (ETTP) only a few papers focus on scheduling exams without registration data as the requirements for exams are often more strict or partial information is known from course registrations. In this paper we show that, using robustness techniques, we can also define the examination timetabling problem based on curricula. We introduce three robustness soft constraints that address the inherent uncertainty when using the curriculum-based model. These soft criteria are analyzed using a multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm and the results are compared on the found Pareto front approximations. We give experiments that show that without a significant loss in solution quality the chance of rescheduling after the exact numbers for the model are known is significantly reduced.

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How to cite

APA:

Bassimir, B., & Wanka, R. (2024). On the Computation of Robust Examination Timetables: Methods and Experimental Results. Journal of Scheduling.

MLA:

Bassimir, Bernd, and Rolf Wanka. "On the Computation of Robust Examination Timetables: Methods and Experimental Results." Journal of Scheduling (2024).

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